Key Predictions for End User Computing (EUC) in 2022

April 11, 2022

Earlier this year, my friends at VMware’s CTO office laid out their thoughts on key drivers for End User Computing in 2022. Three months into the new year, I wanted to add to their predictions and make some new predictions based on conversations with our own customers.

Prediction #1 – VPNs are dying

Paging Captain Obvious, right?
During the pandemic, people realized that their VPNs were one of their most vulnerable areas and that they can no longer just provide broad access back to the entire corporate network to their remote users. Micro-perimeters, continuous policy enforcement, and the wide availability of Secure Access Server Edge (SASE) offerings are moving everyone past VPNs nowadays.

Good riddance. There has been plenty of research done involving the amount of bandwidth necessary to support a mobile workforce with a solution like a VPN vs. another more optimized solution like Citrix and their HDX protocol. In modern IT, data transference is important. There are all sorts of reasons, direct cost assuming you are using someone else’s technology (Azure), local network constraints and collision, individuals WAN connectivity reliability, etc. More optimized technology is better. What is necessary to understand is what impact this has from a cost perspective. Individual miles may vary, but the point is that thorough testing should be completed to model modernization efforts before being executed.

Prediction #2 – Multi-Cloud

Moving out of the security realm, another area I believe will be important in 2022 will be the wide acknowledgment that all of us are going to live in a multi-cloud world; that is, a world where we will purposefully and actively maintain resources in multiple clouds. You might think of this mainly in terms of the hyperscaler clouds (AWS, Azure, GCP, etc), but there are over 4,000 clouds in the world! Many of these are so-called “industry clouds” (clouds that serve the needs of a specific vertical) or “sovereign clouds” (clouds that physically run in specific jurisdictions for regulatory and compliance reasons).

Back in the day, the thought exercise was around figuring out what was going to run in “the cloud” and what was going to stay “on-premises”. But in 2022, we realize that “the cloud” means “many, many clouds” and “on-premises” means “just another local node which plugs into the vast web of many, many clouds.”

I’ve always felt strongly that it would never be the “year of the VDI.” I’ve thought that the best solution was always a hybrid solution, especially contextualized around the needs of the customer we are trying to service. There are reasonable solutions for some that are worse for others. Fortunately, the current marketplace has MANY options, which are fantastic and challenging. Challenging from the perspective that you need to pick the best configuration for YOUR workflow, and always remember to test your theories.

Prediction #3 – EUC experience

Another trend that emerged from the pandemic is that people are finally starting to look at the broad, end-to-end, true EUC “experience.” It’s no longer good enough to just tell users, “Get your own home broadband, here’s the URL for the apps, good luck!” With so many workers scattered out of the office, and with so many variables, including device specifications, what else is running on the devices, home Wi-Fi contention, local ISP congestion, the tubes, VPN saturation, etc., IT departments have realized that they need to get a better picture of what the experience is actually like from the end user’s perspective.

Luckily there are plenty of tools to help with this and we see 2022 as the year that these capabilities go mainstream and IT departments get serious about managing “the last mile.”

This one is near and dear to my heart. I’ve worked for Login VSI since 2016. During that time, I’ve seen the industry’s transformation in the focus of the business leaders. FINALLY, EUC is landing on the C-level desk, and it’s about time. What better KPI for the organization than metrics representing what your users are doing? What makes more sense to a business leader is “our CPU consumption has changed by 5% due to the updates we are making to EPIC.” Or “Since we moved to the latest version of EPIC, our clinician workflow has slowed down by 5%. We’ve analyzed this impact in our testing practice and mitigated it through additional hardware procurement.” One is much more directly linked to the business being done by the customer. I am not saying that the changes in resource consumption are not important. This is NECESSARY when you understand HOW to address the testing discoveries.

In summary

Nothing is new, but something that we have already been dealing with for a while will become more mainstream due to the pandemic and the sudden increase in remote work. For a complete list of predictions for EUC in 2022, read the full blog from VMware’s EUC CTO office.